The season-long battle between Marussia and Caterham is finely poised heading into the final race of the season with rain forecast that could see a race of attrition ensue to allow either team to finish well up the order.

Marussia currently occupy tenth place in the constructors’ championship by virtue of Jules Bianchi’s thirteenth-place finish at the Malaysian Grand Prix back in March. Although finishing P10 with zero points may not appear to matter much, there is a sizeable increase in prize money over eleventh place as well as the prestige of being the best of the ‘new’ teams on the grid.

With rain falling throughout today’s qualifying session for the Brazilian Grand Prix, both teams would have felt that there was a chance to get a jump on the field and make it through to Q2 as we saw at Spa earlier this year. Instead, the teams occupied their usual positions at the back of the grid, but Jules Bianchi feels that he could have qualified better than P21 after a mistake cost him time on his fastest lap.

“A very difficult qualifying today,” Bianchi said. “We had to do everything we could early on as we knew the rain was coming, but in the end the window of opportunity was really only one lap. For everything after that it was too wet to improve. I’d made a big mistake at the end of my one quick lap as well, so it’s disappointing as I was so close to van der Garde. So now we just have to be positive for the race and do everything possible to achieve the right result for the team.”

For Caterham to finish ahead of Marussia, either Giedo van der Garde or Charles Pic must finish thirteenth or higher during the race on Sunday. For this to happen, a race with multiple retirements must ensue but a wet race could allow this to happen. Regardless, the season-long battle between these two teams is set to go down to the very last lap.

This mirrors the events of 2012 when Caterham’s Vitaly Petrov passed Pic (then with Marussia) in the final few laps of the season to claim tenth place in the constructors’.